PAGE Hall in Sheffield is a monument to the failure of the state's experiment in multiculturalism.

Due to official dogma, this area is rapidly turning into a cauldron of suspicion and squalor. A never-ending influx of Roma people from eastern Europe is fuelling combustible tensions with local residents, many of whom are immigrants from Asia. As complaints about feckless, intimidating behaviour by the Roma intensify, the air is now thick with warnings about ethnic conflict.

The sense of deepening social chaos in Page Hall was vividly illustrated last week by this paper's reports of two attempts by Roma immigrants to make money from the sale of babies. In one, Colin Barton, the owner of a chip shop, said that he was approached by a teenager who offered him a new-born child for £250. It is almost unbelievable that this could happen in 21st-century Britain but such depraved conduct is part of the world created by the ideology of multiculturalism, where the values of traditional civilisation are constantly undermined.

Page Hall's descent into social breakdown is just a foretaste of what will happen across Britain next year as the final restrictions on migrants from eastern Europe are removed. From January, 29 million Bulgarians and Romanians will gain the right to settle here, bringing a large number of Roma to our shores.

Already there are estimated to be 200,000 Roma people living here but that number will be dwarfed once all border controls are lifted. "In January the only thing left will be the goat," says one Roma father of seven, warning that his entire village plans to come to England.

This wave of mass immigration from two of Europe's most impoverished countries will be a disaster for Britain, hastening the collapse in national identity, wrecking social cohesion and imposing an intolerable strain on civic infrastructure.

Welfare bills will soar, not least because many migrants are adept at exploiting the laxity of our benefits. Even now a third of all sellers of the Big Issue fundraising magazine are Romanian, since such a role allows them to claim self-employed status and thereby gain access to social security. Incredibly, over the past five years there have been 27,000 arrests out of an estimated population of 87,000 Romanians living in London.

David Blunkett warned that there could be rioting in Britain's cities [GETTY]

Real integration is impossible when ethnic groups are encouraged to cling to customs, practices, even languages from their homeland

This act of institutionalised self-destruction has been foisted on us by a treacherous political class that selfrighteously preens itself over its devotion to multiculturalism and open borders. The imposition of mass immigration over recent decades has been accompanied by a barrage of official propaganda extolling the joys of diversity and portraying all opposition to this creed as racist bigotry.

But the spin machine cannot maintain the illusion of success.

Even the high priests of political correctness have to admit that something has gone wrong. So last week two of Sheffield's most senior MPs, Labour's David Blunkett and Nick Clegg of the Liberal Democrats, attacked the conduct of the Roma in their city.

Blunkett warned that there would be "an explosion" unless there is a change "in the culture of the incoming Roma community", while Clegg said that the Roma "behave in a way that people sometimes find intimidating, sometimes offensive". Yet for all its apparent candour, the language of the two men reeks of opportunism and double-standards. In reality they were both responding to grievances expressed primarily by the local Pakistani community.

Would they have used such rhetoric if it was just the white British working-class people complaining about a minority group? I doubt it.

In such a case they would probably have shrieked about the intolerance of the indigenous population. Indeed, Clegg now has the nerve to bleat about the duty of the Roma "to be sensitive to the way of life as lived in this country", yet he had never taken such a robust line with Muslims in Yorkshire, even as some cling to deeply unBritish practices such as the adoption of Sharia law or the wearing of the burka.

Obsessed with hierarchies of victimhood the Left sees grievances as only being legitimate if they come from a migrant community.

Jack Straw admitted his government made a 'spectacular mistake' on migration [GETTY]

We are paying a terrible price for the creed of Left-wing politicians.

They pose as champions of progress yet their fixation with multiculturalism is dragging us into a new dark age. In many of our cities, social solidarity is being replaced by divisive tribalism, democracy by identity politics.

Real integration is impossible when ethnic groups are encouraged to cling to customs, practices, even languages from their homeland.

Female emancipation has been set back by misogyny imported from the developing world, as re-flected by honour killings, forced marriages and female genital mutilation. There are estimated to be 66,000 cases of such torture in Britain yet not a single prosecution has been mounted. In the name of liberal tolerance, vicious intolerance is flourishing in our midst, repressing free speech and promoting dangerous extremism.

The tragedy is that immigrants wanted to come to Britain precisely because it was a well-ordered and harmonious place. "The gentleness of English civilisation is its most marked characteristic," wrote George Orwell in 1941. Now, as Page Hall shows, all that is being lost through the multicultural revolution.